��Norway's Arabrot kept things simple for the title for their latest album, but nothing else has been scaled back with the band, least of all their ultra-heavy, blown out sound. The band's stomping, skull-shredding aggression is in full effect with this new batch of songs; more than ever, Arabrot sound like some evil, noise-damaged version of the Melvins, and the songs featured on their sixth album Arabrot are as heavy as anything I've heard from these guys, doused in allusions to religious and literary symbolism and references to the surrealism movement. I've been a huge fan of this Norwegian noise rock band's brand of menacing, bludgeoning sludge ever since I picked up their ear-scraping Moneyshot EP back in 2006, and despite the fact that the band has gained all sorts of accolades in their home country (even winning the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy award a few years ago), their music is some of the most abrasive, discordant noise rock you're going to find, loaded with massive riffage buried under the paint-peeling distortion and bone-scraping bass that rivals the sort of triumphant battle-riffs you'd get from High On Fire. Arabrot's ugly, anthemic noise is also distinguished by frontman Kjetil Nernes's awesome rabid vocals, which shift between a murderous seething whisper to a ferocious earth-shaking bellow, and they also continue to infect their music with a heavy layer of experimental noise and electronic malevolence, courtesy of guest member Lasse Marhaug (Jazkamer) who contributes blasts of garbled electronic chaos and tortured glitch and sheets of abrasive drone that are threaded throughout the album.

�� Some of my favorite moments on here include the grinding angular chug of "Ha-Satan D�ofol", and the crushing lurch and demented singsong vocals on "Throwing Rocks At The Devil" ; these songs wind through massive serpentine riffs aglow in eerie psychedelic textures from organ and synthesizer. "Arrabal's Dream" is one of the album's catchier songs, a churning violent space-sludge anthem that features guest vocals from Kylesa's Laura Pleasants, her voice rising like an incantation over the tribal drumming and driving, mid-tempo metallic crush and cosmic synthesizer whoosh, and the monstrous "Blood On The Poet" is riddled with wrecked slide guitar and more of that crazed schizoid singing. "Drawing Down The Moon" has squalls of haunting, ethereal jazzy trumpet from Jan Sjonneby howling across the background of this bass-heavy angular sludge anthem , occasionally blasted with concrete mixer noise. The quirky, infectious hook of "The Horns Of The Devil Grow" explodes into one of the album's noisiest, most in-the-red blasts of crumbling distorted heaviness, followed by the apocalyptic lust anthem "M�nads" that closes the album, a delirious dirge shrouded in the sounds of piano and harmonium. It's some of the heaviest noise rock I've heard in ages, monstrous and metallic with blasts of brutal double bass and crushing metallic riffage, the heaviness flecked with traces of harmonium, pump organ, piano, and slide guitar, and these songs often hide a huge pop hook under all of the grueling ugliness and violence. Definitely one of the heaviest album's I've heard in the past year, and the best noise rock album I listened to all of last year, without a doubt. We've got this in stock on both CD and LP, with the LP version also including a copy of the CD inside of the package.